Significant for ardent devotees of Joplin; less than essential for others.
A memoir of the author’s time working for the spellbinding Janis Joplin.
Most of the action in former road manager Cooke’s narrative takes place in venues like Monterey, the Chelsea Hotel and the Haight, but it’s when Joplin is at home in the Lone Star State, among straights and squares and beehive-haired classmates, that Cooke’s account takes off: “Most of her classmates look older than her,” he writes of an ill-fated reunion. “It’s as if the last time they had fun was in high school and they don’t expect to have fun ever again.” Though fretful, fearful and worn down by her well-known dependencies on the needle and the bottle, Joplin was all about making fun for herself and those around her, and though there’s a certain inevitability throughout these pages that things aren’t going to end well, Joplin emerges as someone we all might like to have known. That said, there’s also a gulf between Cooke and his subject; part has to do with her reserve and her unwillingness to get involved with an employee (airplane make-out sessions notwithstanding), but part has to do with Cooke’s failure to be in the right place at the right time. He chose not to stay at the Chelsea (“a decision I will later regret”), set up house on North Beach rather than in the Haight and otherwise exercised counter-countercultural tendencies (“I’m a beatnik, not a hippie”) that led Big Brother and company to hold him at arm’s length. Still, if his portrait of Joplin herself doesn’t shed much new light, Cooke is good on the politics of the music business and the decisions that might not have been in her best interests.
Significant for ardent devotees of Joplin; less than essential for others.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-425-27411-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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